


stories from the great expanse

by peonies



Series: university with the crew [4]
Category: Bleach
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-28
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2018-12-20 22:46:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11930904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peonies/pseuds/peonies
Summary: After seven years, they meet again. Uryuu keeps his promise. Orihime does a little more than that.





	1. airport

**Author's Note:**

> A series of short pieces this time, and hopefully - eventually - a resolution.

There are so many things to do up until the moment he leaves – give his key to his neighbor so he can water his plants, eat or toss all of the perishables in the fridge, arrange for someone to cover his shifts, submit reports to his PI, buy tickets, book hotel rooms, pay the utilities bill, clean the kitchen – that the reality of it all doesn’t sink in until he’s trudging through the strip mall inside Narita Airport with a backpack so heavy that the cushioned straps are cutting into his shoulders. Duty-free shoppers of every nationality dart in and out of the brightly-lit shops, looking for presents and souvenirs.

There’s a package cushioned between two shirts in his suitcase, already on its way to his gate. He suddenly finds himself overcome with worry, wondering if she’ll like it, if it’s too kitschy for her taste, if he should have gotten something else, if he should have packed it more carefully…

Uryuu sits down in a row of empty chairs near his gate, slinging his backpack down in front of himself so it leans against his knees. He’s incredibly early, and the last flight probably departed not too long ago, so there are only a few potential passengers dotting the seats. The floor-to-ceiling windows are coated with some kind of anti-reflective coating so the noonday sun doesn’t blind them. He’ll have to pull his shade down on the plane, and he’s pretty sure he gets window seat priority for that.

There’s a sort of anxiety simmering in him, a muttering restlessness. He pulls out his phone.

11:33 (ME)  
I’m at my gate. Just waiting for the plane now so I can board.

Fifteen minutes, twenty minutes. He keeps checking his phone even though it’s set to vibrate when he receives notifications. 

 _Stop it,_ he tells himself sternly. _You weren’t like this when you messaged her two days ago._ But he’s never quite been able to attain the state of perfect rationality Ryuuken modelled for him, so he flips through his applications, pulling up screenshots of his boarding pass and itinerary just in case. Fidgeting.

He closes his eyes, slipping his phone into his pocket, and folds his arms across his chest, leaning back against the chair. His foot taps against the floor irritably. _What’s wrong with you?_

_Well, is she going to be there when I get off the plane?_

His eyes snap open the moment the thought surfaces. _Stupid. She’s not like that. She wouldn’t go to the trouble of setting everything up and then leave you stranded._

Still, the feeling sticks to his skin like a film of static. What irks him more isn’t the nervousness itself, but its unpredictability. There is no reason he should be feeling this way about going to meet a friend. More than a friend, really: a comrade, a confidante, a caretaker in the worst of times. There isn’t anything to be afraid of, no earthly (or unearthly) reason to expect betrayal or abandonment, and yet…

Uryuu drags his backpack away from the gate to a fast food restaurant with a tiny seating area and orders some noodles. His distractedness has him repeating his order a third time to an exasperated cashier who waves him over to a table once he gets out a well-formed sentence and hands her his card. He slinks over to the corner and sips at a cup of water, increasingly miserable as his phone continues to not notify him of any messages. It is, he admits to himself with no small amount of chagrin, pretty late in her timezone, and she might even be asleep by now, especially since she’s going to be picking him up at an odd hour. She could probably get in a solid ten or eleven hours before he lands. He hunches down even further behind his cup of water. Worrying doesn’t fix anything, and she’ll just reply when she replies.

 _If she does,_ his brain supplies unhelpfully, reminding him that he’s going to spend twelve hours in the air without access to his network. The cashier clears her throat at the register and repeats his order number. He shuffles up to the counter, takes his bowl of noodles, and retreats back to his corner, feeling like an absolute teenager.

Getting food in his stomach does calm him down. Well, it doesn’t make him feel better, per se, but the wild swings his mood takes between the astoundingly irrational fear of Orihime not showing up and his complete exasperation at his own insecurity become much more temperate and tolerable. Grimly, he glances at the cashier, who looks away quickly once he catches her staring at him. He must look ridiculous.

No messages even as he makes his way back to the gate, which is starting to fill up with passengers. His old seat is taken, so he wedges himself between two packs of tourists – one returning to the United States and one beginning what looks to be a very involved vacation – and waits with as much dignity as a twenty-six-year-old doctoral candidate of pharmaceutical chemistry should be able to muster, which, after having endured the despotic reigns of several tyrannical PIs, is unfortunately not much. The chatter of each tourist group, English and Korean battling for supreme decibel height, is just about enough to give him a headache. Travelling is a miserable experience in general, but this is a little more than his previous experiences have taught him to handle.

He pinches the bridge of his nose, massaging it to ward off the impending pain and irritation. The incomprehensibility of his anxiety threatens to crush him like a ball of paper. What was he even thinking, flying to America? What had either of them been thinking? Shouldn’t they have just sorted all of this, the past seven years of dancing around one of the biggest questions of their lives, around trust and distrust and blood and power and death, over a video call? He’s so sure that she’s found someone else – because she’s genuine, because she has beauty and brains and _compassion,_ because they just made a silly promise one summer years and years ago when they had just begun to recover from years and years of war, and there’s no reason, absolutely no reason for them to keep it because they are different people now, so different from the uneasy children they used to be, wearing adulthood like a costume – and he is still the one who stayed, a custodian, a gravekeeper, a reminder of everything they’ve struggled to get past.

And then his phone buzzes.

12:58 INOUE O

Yay!! See you soon! ✈ I’ll be waiting at the luggage carousel when you get here!

It’s in that moment – or maybe before, when he was pushing his way through throngs of tourists with designer shopping bags dangling from their arms – or maybe after, sitting in his seat, backpack tucked into the overhead container, with the afternoon sun pouring golden and achingly familiar onto his lap through the acrylic glass of his oval window – or maybe even after that, when everything is silent save for the stress of the plane, and they are all hanging above the glittering silver expanse of the Pacific Ocean – yes, then, gently, but wholly –

He knows that he loves her, and has known for many, many years, but time has changed it into something different. He loves her like a boy now, not a soldier, in a soft and cautious way. He’d felt like a teenager before because he is, in essence, starting over. Time has given them a second chance to care for each other somewhere far beyond the battlefield, rewinding, somehow, so that he can feel the brash uncertainty of youth in him again, untouched by the bow or the sword.

 _Wait for me,_ he thinks, looking down at the ocean. _Just a little longer._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for Ishihime Week - Day 1 - a soft realization.


	2. arrivals

She is two years away from finishing her doctoral program in cognitive psychology when the promised summer arrives. They made plans six months prior, so they could make sure the gap in their busy schedules aligned perfectly. It’s highlighted in pink on the calendar pinned to the wall of her cubicle – _LEAVE_ in English followed by a long arrow that goes through to Monday of the next week. On the calendar in her phone, it says _Uryuu Visiting,_ the cells colored a soft blue.

It feels like she is floating in the darkness, squinting into the distance for the shape of the future. Whenever she closes her eyes, she sees it: the unknown plains of the years she has before her, stretching out like the night sky, and every choice she makes a silver light, a Milky Way of possibility glowing just ahead as she moves endlessly and helplessly forward through time.

The breadth of this country scares her, sometimes, even after four years, too big and too empty, full of old, old ghosts she doesn’t recognize that shake the earth in an agony she does not know how to name. She has never felt foreign in her life, and now the unwieldiness of her tongue and the way she moves gives her up to watching eyes. It’s better now than it was before, but it wears at her like waves against stone. Her old wounds have sealed up, and now she is only adrift in uncertainty.

Los Angeles itself is too big. It grows and shrinks depending on the time of day, arteries pumping with gasoline and alcohol, the haze of pollution bending the light of sunset into brilliant pink and red and orange. Even coming from four years of study in Tokyo, it’s altogether too busy and too lonely; the streets are wide but empty save for the cars that stream by. The people she always sees on the sidewalks seem to have been left there, pushed up against old factories by the growing silver towers and apartment complexes. She feels like she could get lost here and never find her way back home.

It isn’t as if she is alone, not really. She has people she knows, friends, colleagues, classmates. Her warm and friendly nature attracts them easily. There are a few acquaintances from high school and Todai that moved here for business, and she gets dinner with them once in a while. But those nights of letting her mother tongue come back to the front of her mouth are few and far between in such an endless city, and it is all too easy to get lost in her difference, lingering in the few neighborhoods where she can speak with eloquence.

The night before his flight arrives, she lies in bed and stares into the darkness at the backs of her eyelids, watching the sea of phosphene static move in silence. There is something warm and bright in her chest that she knows as anticipation, excitement, relief. Someone who understands is coming. Someone who has all of the memories she does, who knows the years they spent in a battle no one knows about, who has seen the same death that she has. Who knows how alone she is in a foreign land. A friend. An old schoolmate. A brilliant light moving into her line of vision. She misses him, of course she does, but there is that childish and uncontainable joy there, too, at the thought of seeing his face, speaking to him, knowing him.

The shape of the future is a comet in the night, hurtling toward the bridge across the Milky Way with reckless abandon, leaving a gleaming trail in its wake, a thing of relentless beauty filled with the promise of decision. An omen, a portent. A miracle.

The shape of the future is – Ishida Uryuu by the luggage carousel, lifting his suitcase from the conveyor belt. The shape of his hand, fingers spread, when she calls to him and he waves to her in response. The sudden curve of his smile.

“I missed you,” she says, and hugs him close.

After a moment, she feels his arms wrap around her, returning the embrace.

“I missed you, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written (belatedly) for Ishihime Week - Day 2 - chasing comets.


	3. traffic

How to explain the return of sunlight? As if he had spent the last seven years living with the sun eclipsed above him, as if he had just emerged from a night that lasted seven years. Words fail him. She is soft in his arms, but strong, almost too strong for him to bear. He feels like rain embracing a city.

(The city’s hair smells great, by the way.)

They proceed back to her car, chatting about nothing in particular. She wants updates on life in Karakura; he wants to know what she’s been doing over here, what the world is like in this hemisphere beyond tourism and Hollywood. It happens seamlessly, automatically, and it is so comfortable that he never wants it to end. He loads his suitcase and his backpack into the trunk of her car, and she drives him away from LAX to get lunch.

He still feels grimy and dry from the long plane ride breathing recycled air at three thousand meters above the earth. He’s tired, too, but it’s as if he needs to get to the next episode of his favorite show (it’s not Ghost Bust anymore, it’s a nice drama that he can cosplay in public without anyone noticing). It’s not that he doesn’t want to sleep, it’s that he _can’t_ sleep.

The place she takes them to eat at is some kind of fast food restaurant. She orders for them in the streamlined, bulletproof English of a language immersion student, and soon they take their burgers and fries in little red trays to one of the tables.

“You haven’t had one of these before, have you?” She asks the question around a mouthful of burger.

“I don’t think so,” he says, picking up a fry coated in melted cheese and grilled onions. “I think I was in Michigan for a conference, once. I never ate anything like this.” It tastes exactly like it looks. Familiar, even – he doesn’t know what he expected of American fast food, but he guesses that big cities like Tokyo and Los Angeles are bound to share some of the same tastes. Like McDonald’s, or Starbucks. The burger tastes like a burger. His lemonade tastes like lemonade.

Orihime, on the other hand, is not quite like anything or anyone else. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s so much more interested in what she has to say than what his lunch tastes like, that there’s only one of her, that she always finds a way to make him laugh and look at himself more kindly – he is nothing less than entranced.

Soon they’re talking over empty wrappers and paper cups and leftover packets of ketchup. He exchanges an Urahara anecdote for the story of how she learned to drive. It feels like he’s only gotten a few glimpses into her life here when he looks at his phone and realizes that he has to check into his hotel. So they keep the conversation going as they get back into the car and she takes them back onto the congested roads, patiently tailgating the Mercedes in front of her like every other car around them for about a mile. She handles the steering wheel almost delicately, except for when she slams on the brake and subsequently on the horn a few times.

Sitting there, stuck in traffic, the car crawling forward so slowly that it might as well have been still, he listens to her tell the story of how she made her first friend in America.

How to explain that she _is_ the sun? How to explain the warmth of her, the everpresence, the effusive glow? What can he offer as an explanation except for myth? The fox’s wedding, the sunshower, that strange intermingling of sunlight and rain that makes him feel like he’s stepped into a different world. A place where they can exist together for a while.

He feels content.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for Ishihime Week - Day 3 - sunshower.


	4. casual

It’s not until she takes his hand on that brightly-lit street that everything comes back into focus again. It’s Orihime and Uryuu and Eiko and Christina and Brandon – or Uryuu and Orihime and Orihime’s friends – or Uryuu and the Americans – walking and talking, animated, chattering in a dialect of English inlaid with Japanese, heading to dinner. Orihime and Christina are the most adept bilinguals in the group, but Orihime’s English doesn’t have the swooping range of Christina’s, and Christina’s Japanese is just as piercingly casual as her English. He wonders if that’s common amongst the nikkei, because Brandon, with a Japanese father and American mother, always talks like he’s with family, even in the fragments of his father’s language he’s picked up.

Her hand wraps around his, gently, cool and dry, and he curls his fingers around hers almost instinctually, before he realizes –

No one else seems to notice, or perhaps they just assumed – so he turns his hand around and presses his palm to hers, feeling her fingers slip between his. She flashes a bright smile at him before returning to the conversation, and still no one looks. The moment is his own.

When Uryuu speaks up, they’re at dinner, properly, at some yakiniku place where their order is taken in English. It’s there he finds that they all assumed he was quiet and didn’t like to talk much, or that he only spoke Japanese, and oh, how he wishes Ichigo were here so he could see the look on his face.

“Have you been enjoying LA, Uryuu?” Christina asks brightly. “I mean, you’ve only been here for, like, three days, but I’m sure Ori gave you the whirlwind tour.”

He files “Ori” away for later. “I really have been enjoying myself, yeah,” he says, ignoring Brandon’s barely-suppressed spittake. “It’s almost like being in a movie.”

“Stay longer than three days and it’ll feel nothing like a movie by the end,” Christina warns him half-jokingly. She reaches out with her tongs to flip a piece of brisket over. “Where’ve you guys gone so far? Other than, like, Little Tokyo, and stuff?”

“The boardwalk,” he says.

“Hollywood Boulevard,” Orihime adds, and Eiko wrinkles her nose.

“And we went to the Getty.”

“I like the Getty,” Eiko chirps, waving a plume of smoke away from her face as she reaches in for the meat. “There was an exhibit on… fashion photographs? Fashion photography. But that was, uh, last year.”

“Oh, Uryuu’s into fashion!”

He gawks at Orihime for a full second but manages to cover it up with a napkin, as if he’s wiping his mouth. “Yes. I, uh… used to make my own clothing.”

Christina demands pictures. He doesn’t have any on his phone, but Orihime, for some reason, does, and he has to push her elbow a bit when she leans over the table to show them off, because he’s a little scared she’s going to put it down on the grill.

“Your English is really good,” Brandon says with a self-conscious smile. “Not trying to be a jerk or anything. You’re just quiet.”

The directness, as always, throws him for a loop, but he recovers well, in his own opinion. “Thank you. To be honest, I didn’t expect you to know any Japanese.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Oh? Why’s that?”

Uryuu shrugs. “You’re very… American.”

Brandon looks down at his sweatshirt, rolled up to the elbows, and his basketball shorts, sneakers. “Valid. I mean, I’m yonsei. My great-grandparents were the OG nikkei.”

“He doesn’t know what OG means,” Christina says, ruffling his hair. “God, you’re such an AAS major.”

“Stop,” he whines, trying to push her hands away. “Get your paws off me, Mori, I’m tryna eat.”

She grins. “My grandparents came through Hawai’i. I had to interview them for a class I took last year.”

They trail off into a hushed conversation together, as if it’s something secret between them. Orihime is putting her phone back into her pocket, chatting to Eiko about high school, picking meat off of the grill only half-looking.

He can’t hear the two nikkei over the crackling of the burner, but Christina has a thoughtful expression on her face, turned sideways, her left arm hooked over the back of the chair, and Brandon is twisted to look at her, mouth and hands moving in the nimble cadence of a native speaker.

There are wounds, here, he thinks. He can’t see them now, but someday, maybe. They have something shared, history that he never learned, that glues them together, heavy on their shoulders. He wonders if that’s what they see in him, in Orihime. History, and all of its undercurrents. Fingerprints of a thousand different people, from a different world.

Orihime laughs at something, tosses her head back, and reaches for his hand beneath the table, closes it in hers for a moment before letting go. When her glass of water is empty, he flags down the waiter to have it refilled.

He’s not sure how obvious it is, if anyone sees him looking at her all the time. Like a man who keeps staring into the sun.

When they walk back to Eiko’s car, he offers his arm, and she takes it as if she’s taken it a hundred times, her fingers resting in the crook of his elbow.

Suddenly, the world is a very small place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bet you thought I was dead lmaoo  
> (only mostly dead)
> 
> written for the 4th prompt of ishihime week - subtlety.


	5. weekend

Christina, sunglasses tucked on top of her head, drives them down to Long Beach on Saturday, just the three of them. It takes ages, he thinks, but he supposes that’s just what this city is like, long drives and conversations in cars. 

The two girls are talking about some campus event, for graduate students. Comparing how their orientations are shaping up, what they’re expected to do for the incoming cohort, complaining about the expectations of the faculty.

“I have to give a tour,” Christina says with a heavy sigh, fingers tapping on top of the steering wheel as they sit in traffic. “Of the whole campus. It’s not like they’ll ever see the undergrad half.”

“I thought that was the student liaison’s job.”

“Yeah, our department is a little smaller than yours.”

“Oh, that’s right!”

They park in Christina’s aunt’s driveway – at least, that’s what he thinks is happening – and walk down to the beach. _Junipero,_ Christina calls it. White sand, blue ocean, palm trees. It’s exactly what California looks like in the movies, he thinks, joggers with sun-bleached hair, college students setting up plays at the volleyball nets, a lot of small dogs.

“So, how do you two know each other?” Christina asks him, taking off her sandals. She puts them in her bag, digging her toes into the sand. “Sorry, just curious!”

“High school,” they both say simultaneously.

“Mutual friend,” he adds, at the same time as she says “Arts club!”

Christina gives them an amused look, but winks, and says “Gotcha.”

The three of them take a long walk down the beach, the relentless sun glittering on the waves. Occasional breezes try to snatch Orihime’s floppy-brimmed sun hat away. Christina peppers them both with questions about their lives in Japan, his work, their childhoods. Orihime, like him, navigates around the negative space of their secret lives, like skipping over a creaky stair. He hasn’t danced this dance with another person in so long that he almost trips over his own feet a few times.

“Are you Catholic?” She points to the small silver cross dangling from his wrist. He usually keeps it tucked up in his sleeve, but it’s a little too hot to wear any fabric below the elbow.

“No,” he replies, hurriedly. “It was, um, a gift from my ojii-san.”

“Oh, that’s so cool! Is it, like, a family heirloom?”

It’s clear from Christina’s open effervescence why Orihime feels so comfortable around her. It feels nice, to be a person of interest. To be inquired after. He doesn’t do a lot of that, himself. At least, not as much as he should.

“Yes,” he says, although what kind of heirloom it is, he does not specify. “It’s been in the family for generations.”

She’s probably thinking of the missionaries of Nobunaga’s time - and she’s not strictly wrong, but not right, either, so he fails to elaborate. Orihime, ever observant, catches his split-second hesitation and bumps his elbow with hers, putting her hat on his head.

“This really isn’t my style,” he complains in Japanese, but she just laughs and takes it back after she’s done tying up her hair, folding it into her bag.

“Sorry! My hair was sticking to my lip gloss!”

“I’m pretty sure my lips are _covered_ in sand,” Christina commiserates, patting at them with her forefinger.

Uryuu secures the bracelet around his wrist, shoving his hands into his pockets. The sand is hot on the soles of his feet, and the sun sparks off of his glasses into his eyes, so he hooks them into the front of his shirt, complete inability to see anything be damned. Even from two feet away, he can barely make out the girls’ features.

At the end of their walk, they’re standing ankle-deep in wet sand as the surf slides up the shore, talking about nothing. His shoes, tied at the laces, are slung over his shoulder, and he rolls his jeans up to his knees. Without his glasses, he can barely see the boats tracking back and forth out behind the waves, where the ocean turns true blue. Orihime has her arm hooked through his, again. He takes a deep, diaphragmatic breath, pulling the air in from the bottoms of his lungs until they’re full to bursting, and lets it out in a thin stream through his mouth. He feels a little light-headed.

“Where do you guys wanna go for lunch?”

“Mm, Eiko said you went to eat noodles last time?”

“Oh, the Cambodian place. Did you want to try that? ‘Cuz I don’t mind going back, their noodles are bomb.”

Orihime sways back and forth in contemplation, pulling at his arm. “What else is there?”

In half an hour, they’re sitting elbow-to-elbow and knee-to-knee at a small table, slurping up noodles while the waitstaff takes orders in Khmer from the family behind them. He picks out the shrimp from his broth to eat first, letting their conversation fade to a pleasant buzz at the back of his head. Reminds him of sitting in a café with his lab partners, almost, because of the easy flow of it. Never thought he’d be this relaxed in America.

“So, how long have you two been together?”

He almost spits his mouthful of rice noodles back into the bowl and definitely chokes on something. Orihime thumps him soundly on the back to clear his throat, but she’s also laughing at him, and his face is not only red from his struggle with a blocked windpipe.

“Um,” he croaks eloquently, grabbing for his water. Over the rim of the cup, he looks frantically at Orihime, but she seems satisfied with cracking up at him, and Christina seems like she’s hiding a grin behind her knuckles. “I – we’re not.”

Orihime pats his back again and puts her elbow on the table, leaning in conspiratorially. “Oh, we’re not?”

Water goes down his windpipe this time, and he coughs violently. He’s sure his face is going to explode from how much blood is rushing to it. “Inoue-san!”

“Stop teasing him, Ori, it’s mean,” Christina says between giggles.

“America has changed you,” he accuses her, shaking his head.

She just keeps laughing. But, he finds, he doesn’t mind it, and hides his own smile in a spoonful of broth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just popping in to confirm that I am super not dead now
> 
> written for ishihime week, day 5 - seaside.


End file.
